How Trenches works: the road, paper trades, battles

This page is your map of Trenches: where the lessons are, how a practice trade works, and where to get help. After reading it, you can start the Memecoin starter, make a paper trade and read its receipt, play a battle, and find Toro, the Hub and the Discord.

Every trade on Trenches uses paper cash, practice money with no real value, at real market prices.

This map follows Trenches on a computer, where a sidebar lists the pages. On a phone, the main parts sit behind five tabs at the bottom: Hub, Trade, Battles, Ranks and You.

Where are the lessons?

Trenches has six courses: crypto, stocks, forex (currencies), economics, macro (the economy as a whole) and personal finance. Each course is a road from beginner to advanced, split into sections, then units, then short lessons called levels. Pick a level, then press Start. On a phone, your road opens from the Hub tab.

Each level builds on the ones before it, so the order matters. A tag on the road, START HERE or CONTINUE, marks where to go next.

Memecoins have a shorter way in: the Memecoin starter, seven units from the Crypto road, arranged for people who have never bought a coin:

Why a coin has a price at all: a price is only the last trade
Read a practice trade: what an order got, and what it cost
Launchpads and creator fees: anyone can launch a coin
Different mechanisms behind a token collapse: the same crash can have different causes
Who buys your exit: a sale needs a buyer right now
Recovery information stays private: your wallet's backup words
Run a complete preflight check: six checks before any coin

New to memecoins? Read What a memecoin is, and why attention is the market first.

The starter opens the first level of each of its seven units, wherever they sit on the road. The levels inside each unit still open one at a time.

Finishing all seven opens Token powers, a harder section further along the Crypto road.

How does a lesson work?

A level opens with story cards, each teaching one idea in plain words. Then comes the check: six questions in most levels. A miss never ends it: a missed question comes back later, until every answer is right.

Questions use energy, a daily allowance. In the app's words: "Each new question uses 1 energy. Retries and completed reviews are free."

You get 30 energy a day on the web, reset at midnight, and Elite, the paid membership, has unlimited energy. Answers in your course's first unit and in the Memecoin starter use none.

Beside each question sit three kinds of help: Words in this question, Show a hint and Ask Toro. A hint shows its cost before you open it: usually 1 energy, even in the starter.

The words a level teaches go into your dictionary, the book button above the road. Finishing a level the first time adds paper cash to your balance.

How does a paper trade work?

A paper trade is a practice trade with virtual cash. Your order, the request to buy or sell, never reaches a real market. Instead, a simple model in the app works out what your order gets.

Before you make an account you trade with $3,000 of paper cash, and a free account brings it to $10,000. The lesson A paper trade uses real prices and virtual cash starts there.

On the Trade page, the Trenches board shows new memecoins in three columns. New holds coins launched under 6 hours ago. Final Stretch holds coins at least 25 percent of the way along their bonding curve. That curve is the launch rule that prices a new coin by how much of it has sold.

Migrated holds coins that filled the curve and moved to a trading pool: a pair of token reserves, such as the coin and SOL, that a program swaps between. On a phone, the same three lists are the New, Soon and Graduated tabs. How a coin is made: the curve, graduation and the pool explains the curve and the pool.

On a coin's page, the paper ticket, where you set up an order, shows a quote first: an estimate of what the order would get now. Its lines are Avg price, You get, Min received, Price impact and the Fee. Avg price is the average price per coin after price impact, and on a memecoin it shows as a market cap, marked MC.

Slippage is the gap between the price you expect and the one you get. Your slippage limit, set under the gear, is the most you accept: an order that would move the price more than that is refused. Min received is the least you accept: what You get, less your limit. Say You get reads 1,000 coins and your limit is 10 percent: Min received reads 900.

On a phone, the ticket shows You get, and the gear button holds the other lines and the limit, called Max slippage there.

Easy to mix up: price impact and the fee. The fee is a stated percentage, 1 percent on memecoins and 0.25 percent on major coins such as bitcoin, charged on its own Fee line. Price impact is the move your own order causes as it uses what is available to trade against. Its line shows a percent, but it is not charged on its own: it shows up in a worse Avg price.

Say you place a $50 paper buy on a memecoin. The Fee line reads $0.50, and any price impact makes your Avg price worse than the price on screen. The lesson Price impact and the fee are different costs works through both.

A quote is only an estimate. The fill is what your order actually got, and it can differ if the market moved before your order ran. Your position (the coins you hold) and the trades list on your profile's Portfolio tab follow the fill, not the quote. The lesson Quote, submission and fill keeps the two apart.

Each row in that trades list is a short receipt: buy or sell, the coin, the amount, the price, the fee and when.

The lesson What practice can and cannot prove draws the line. Practice tests your steps, sums and plan, but not real size, real fees, delays or how you would act with real money at risk. A paper gain is not money.

What is a battle?

A battle is timed, head to head paper trading on the same market. You both start with the same paper balance, and the bigger gain wins. It is a separate battle balance, never your paper account.

Rated games move your battle rating, a score that starts at 500 and moves like a chess rating: beating a rival rated above you moves it more.

Your rival can be the Trencher, the character who teaches the lessons, played by the AI at your rating. It can also be a player near your rating, or a friend through a challenge link. You pick Rated or Casual, a market and a length, from 10 minutes to 24 hours.

Who is Toro?

Toro, the green bull, is the AI coach of Trenches. In the app's words: "Ask Toro anything: how to trade, what a signal means, how this page works."

Ask Toro sits at the foot of the sidebar on every learning and trading page, and beside every question in a lesson. On a phone, Toro has its own Coach tab in Ranks, and the Question button in a lesson asks it too.

Toro answers from Trenches' own lessons and names the ones it draws on. Once you agree to share, it can also read and review your paper trades. Asking needs a free account, which gets 10 questions a month.

Toro stays with practice, because Trenches is for practice. Its rules keep it from recommending a real money app, an exchange, a wallet, a deposit or a referral offer, and from explaining how to open or fund a real account.

Where do you see your progress and get help?

The Hub is your trader home. Its top strip shows three figures: Paper equity, All time profit and In positions. Paper equity is what your paper account is worth now, and In positions is the part in open trades.

All time profit is your equity minus every paper dollar added to the account, so lesson cash never reads as profit. Say you started with $10,000, lessons added $200, and your account is now worth $10,500. All time profit reads $300, not $500, because the $200 was added, not earned by trading.

With an account, where Go live is offered in your country, the Hub shows a Go live card. Go live means trading memecoins with real money, on pump.fun. The card opens Trenches' own Go live page, never pump.fun directly.

pump.fun is for people 18 or older. Most new coins go to zero. Trade only what you can lose. From paper to real: the way there, with the risks walks through the Go live page.

Ranks sets results side by side: paper profits by day, week or month, battle ratings, and day streaks (days in a row with a finished lesson or review).

The Trenches Discord is where learners talk, since the app has no chat. Its card on the Hub opens it and says what it is for: "Talk, make friends, share paper trades, and say what the lessons need." The rules are short: be kind, no financial advice, no referral or promo links, and nobody tells anyone to start trading for real.

Stuck on a level? Ask Toro, or other learners in the Discord's #lesson-help room. Found a bug, a problem or an idea? Email trading@trenches.academy.